“Which nothing but death will terminate”: Charles Dickens’s ‘The Pickwick Papers’
“Mr Pickwick, having said grace, pauses for an instant, and looks round him. As he does so, the tears roll down his cheeks, in the fulness of his joy. Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness, of which, if we seek them, there are ever some, to cheer our transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.”
Charles Dickens penned The Pickwick Papers aged 24, so it’s rather fitting my grand marathon, embarked upon with my sister in an indefatigable quest to conquer the entire canon of the Goliath of the Victorians, begins this year. I had a few early flirtations with Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, and Great Expectations, the former over the course of one wildly obstinate summer binge aged 14. But this marks the comprehensive swan dive. He’s baked into the foundations of the modern English-language novel, moulded in that most tempestuous forge at its crucible, and thus fascinates me endlessly, especially as I felt I rather skipped over him at uni with a painfully rushed foray into Great Expectations ahead of a typically god tier seminar with Dr Juliette Atkinson. My only fraternisation since has been with Dev Patel’s inexpressibly vivacious turn as David Copperfield.
In his introduction to the magnificent Audible Dickens Collection edition, Neil Gaiman speaks of first discovering the full works of Dickens in his grandparents’ house near Dickens’s Hampshire birthplace during childhood and pulling down The Pickwick Papers because he’d heard it was funny. He read the whole thing over the course of one seaside holiday but found it immensely sad, deciding its humour was one of those things that would have to wait until he was older. He came back to it at the same age Dickens was when he started writing it (again, incidentally the same age I have also happened to take the plunge!), and he loved it.
“There are very few moments in a man’s existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.”
Even just a few pages in I was puzzled to pieces by the revelation that this was his first novel. It’s an absolute tome (though still only his eighth-longest), but it was the fact that that first line was his entrance into history. Because it’s a LABYRINTH:
“The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.”
More than anything, the fact that this is where he started, that this feather-light almost quixotically comical story, so fresh and so funny, was what first came flowing from his pen. A Cervantes-esque oddball assortment of friends unabashedly seeking their adventures with intransigent naivety and scribbling it all down to regale each other with at their bombastic club meetings and “beguile the time with forfeits and old stories”, hoarding anecdotes like wizened dragons curled around mounds of gold.
“Amidst the general hum of mirth and conversation that ensued, there was a little man with a puffy Say–nothing–to–me,–or–I’ll–contradict–you sort of countenance, who remained very quiet; occasionally looking round him when the conversation slackened, as if he contemplated putting in something very weighty; and now and then bursting into a short cough of inexpressible grandeur.”
The four pillars of the club are Pickwick, Snodgrass, Winkle, and Tupman. The eponymous raconteur, as brisk as bees, who surges from slumber at the first glimmer of dawn like an ardent warrior, whose wrath is majestic and whose insurance office is philanthropy itself, is anchored by the immutable tenet that his benevolence is always stronger than his obstinacy.
“There sat the man who had traced to their source the mighty ponds of Hampstead, and agitated the scientific world with his Theory of Tittlebats, as calm and unmoved as the deep waters of the one on a frosty day, or as a solitary specimen of the other in the inmost recesses of an earthen jar.”
Rounding out the core cast of his aforementioned disciples are the too susceptible Tracy Tupman, whose maturer years seemed to superadd the enthusiasms and ardour of a boy; the mercurial Augustus Snodgrass, who sought poetic fame above all, often enigmatically enveloped in his mysterious blue coat; and the sporting Nathaniel Winkle, destined for the most dramatic romantic escapade.
It’s effervescent to the last and riotously hopeful about the human condition, structurally reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales, and first devoured in serial publication before selling 40k copies in its first complete printed edition, which catapulted its author to stardom. You can just imagine the bookworms of 1830s London inhaling it like a soothing incense as Dickens swiftly became the literary opium of the people. The year of 1836… the year of the last hangings for robbery and arson, alongside a spate of arson attacks at workhouses across the country in protest against more restrictive conditions brought into force by the Poor Law Amendment Act; of the return of Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle with faith-shattering evolutionary revelations; of the deadly Lewes avalanche in East Sussex… I reckon they needed a right good laugh. Almost as much as we do in 2021.
“Serjeant Buzfuz, who had proceeded with such volubility that his face was perfectly crimson, here paused for breath. The silence awoke Mr. Justice Stareleigh, who immediately wrote down something with a pen without any ink in it, and looked unusually profound, to impress the jury with the belief that he always thought most deeply with his eyes shut.”
For me it feels very much like the Victorian male response to Jane Austen – big Morecambe and Wise/Monty Python/Blackadder/Footlights energy, like you can trace the thread right back, gleaming gold as Hercules’s Skein of Fate after he rescues Meg…
“With this beautiful peroration, Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz sat down, and Mr. Justice Stareleigh woke up. ‘Call Elizabeth Cluppins,’ said Serjeant Buzfuz, rising a minute afterwards, with renewed vigour. The nearest usher called for Elizabeth Tuppins; another one, at a little distance off, demanded Elizabeth Jupkins; and a third rushed in a breathless state into King Street, and screamed for Elizabeth Muffins till he was hoarse.”
It’s a meandering story of mistaken identities in confused duels, crashing carts stranding its heroes in the countryside before they accidentally shoot each other while hunting rooks, sabotaged elopements to Wickham-esque rogues, nonsensical elections, farcical fancy dress parties, much simping for summer while the titular harlequin is deposited in a dog pound by way of a wheelbarrow in retribution for trespassing, miscommunications resulting in lawsuits, proto-Christmas carols (featuring a gravedigger named Gabriel Grub instead of Scrooge and goblins instead of ghosts), soaring set pieces like the balletic sight of Cockney boot cleaner Sam Weller gliding across a frozen lake doing the “knocking at the cobbler’s door” move like Raeburn’s ‘Skating Minister’ (shortly before Pickwick falls through the ice to a town-wide uproar while the local Sawbone aka ‘Surgeon’ relentlessly prescribes hot punch and suggests bleeding everyone to improve their constitutions), balls in Bath and Birmingham, breathless pursuits of fugitives to Bristol, sobering stints in debtors’ prison (including a sombre authorial interjection on the stark disparity between the rights and conditions of the debtor vs the felon), fireside yarns of ghosts and mail heists in Edinburgh at rapier-point, cockle-warming marriages and reconciliations, and always wherever they go Pickwick’s motley crew pressing people for their stories, forever ready to lend their ears.
“But bless our editorial heart, what a long chapter we have been betrayed into! We had quite forgotten all such petty restrictions as chapters, we solemnly declare. So here goes, to give the goblin a fair start in a new one. A clear stage and no favour for the goblins, ladies and gentlemen, if you please.”
As Neil Gaiman puts it in the audio intro, “Dickens, still known to his readers on the title page of each instalment as Boz, is learning as he goes and discovering what kind of story he is telling as he tells it. The plot, such as it is, accumulates and coalesces around Pickwick and the Wellers like fog. The joy is the journey not the destination.”
Two main arcs do emerge: the farcical sequence of events that lands Pickwick in debtors’ prison and the waylaid courtship of Winkle and Arabella Allen, both crescendoing in the last 150 pages, but it is primarily a piecemeal epic.
And it’s one featuring possibly the most Dickensian roster of names clustered together under one narrative roof… Wardle, Luffey, Jingle, Jinks, Blotton, Bardell, Simmery, Slumkey, Slummintowken, Smangle, Smauker, Smorltork, Slurk, Tollimglower, Podder, Perker, Porkenham, Pott, Trotter, Trundle, Stiggins, Mivins, Cluppins, Dumkins, Tomkins, Nupkins, Porkin, Pipkin, Fizkin, Bunkin, Mordlin, Dibdin, Groffin, Skimpin, Snubbin, Snob, Lobbs, Fogg, Dodson, Dubbley, Boldwig, Griggs, Grundy, Grummer, Muzzle, Mudberry, Heyling, Humm, Buzfuz, Phunky, Noddy, Wildspark, Stareleigh, Snuphanuph, Wugsby, Tadger, Upwitch, Noakes, Stoakes, Crushton, Mutanhed, Matinter, Tuckle, Whiffers, Pruffle, Smouch, Sniggle, Namby, Crookey, Craddock, Raddle, Snicks, Blink, Prosee, Bantam, Blazo, Bolo… All, quite literally, characters in this book.
Its genesis was actually an illustrator’s concept and his hunt for a writer to pen stories to accompany his comical sketches of the “Nimrod” sports club, which illuminates much about the episodic nature and its set piece-led structure. It was a picaresque undertaking from the beginning starring caricatures the unassuming young journalist still writing under his family nickname, Boz, then flamboyantly brought to life on the page. The first illustrator’s life ended in tragedy, after which another was found, continuing the arcs of the farce. But by that point it had very much become Dickens’s tale, one which blazed into the national zeitgeist with the introduction of Sam Weller, the Sancho Panza to Pickwick’s Don Quixote. The latter is reframed as the gentle old romantic we laugh with rather than at as he is taken under the wing of his street-smart servant and ever faithful friend, his innocence rendered angelic rather than foolish, his wit whittled from gullibility into guile. And the story evolves from a sitcom written to accompany prints of sporting misadventures to a socially conscious and fiercely human ode to unity, community, and above all, friendship, “which nothing but death will terminate”. For ultimately, at its core, and to the end, this is a book of friendship forged and family found.
“‘I shall never regret,’ said Mr. Pickwick in a low voice, ‘I shall never regret having devoted the greater part of two years to mixing with different varieties and shades of human character, frivolous as my pursuit of novelty may have appeared to many. Nearly the whole of my previous life having been devoted to business and the pursuit of wealth, numerous scenes of which I had no previous conception have dawned upon me—I hope to the enlargement of my mind, and the improvement of my understanding. If I have done but little good, I trust I have done less harm, and that none of my adventures will be other than a source of amusing and pleasant recollection to me in the decline of life. God bless you all!’”
